University of California, Davis
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2019
Utrecht, Netherlands
  •  25
    Frege on the Fruitfulness of Definitions
    Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 9 (11). 2021.
    What, in Frege’s view, makes definitions fruitful? In Grundlagen §70, Frege offers an answer: Unfruitful definitions are definitions that “could just as well be omitted and leave no link missing in the chain of our proofs”. The §70 passage, however, poses an interpretive puzzle as its characterization of fruitfulness appears to conflict with other conditions that Frege imposes on definitions, namely, eliminability and conservativeness. It appears that the only way to resolve this conflict is to …Read more
  •  28
    Group Knowledge in Interrogative Epistemology
    with S. Smets and A. Baltag
    In Hans van Ditmarsch & Gabriel Sandu (eds.), Jaakko Hintikka on Knowledge and Game Theoretical Semantics, Springer. pp. 131-164. 2018.
    In this paper we formalize an approach to knowledge that we call Interrogative Epistemology, in the spirit of Hintikka’s “interrogative model” of knowledge. According to our approach, an agent’s knowledge is shaped and limited by her interrogative agenda. The dynamic correlate of this postulate is our Selective Learning principle: the agent’s agenda limits her potential for knowledge-acquisition. Only meaningful information, that is relevant to one’s issues, can really be learnt. We use this app…Read more
  •  68
    Frege’s Unification
    History and Philosophy of Logic 40 (2): 135-151. 2018.
    What makes certain definitions fruitful? And how can definitions play an explanatory role? The purpose of this paper is to examine these questions via an investigation of Frege’s treatment of definitions. Specifically, I pursue this issue via an examination of Frege’s views about the scientific unification of logic and arithmetic. In my view, what interpreters have failed to appreciate is that logicism is a project of unification, not reduction. For Frege, unification involves two separate steps…Read more
  •  61
    Formal models for group knowledge can help philosophers gain additional insight into the ramifications of the philosophical concepts that they propose by clarifying the abstract properties of these concepts and their relationship to alternative proposals. To date, however, formal treatments of group knowledge have remained largely disjointed from the related philosophical discussions and are therefore of minimal interest to philosophers. In this thesis, I attempt to bridge this gap by proposing …Read more